Public Domain Enhancement Act - Opposition To PDEA

Opposition To PDEA

Opposition to the Public Domain Enhancement Act comes from the entertainment industry sphere, particularly the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its lobbyists. In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig lays out the reason for the MPAA opposition to the bill:

1. Congress had already "firmly rejected" the concept of copyright renewal in the Copyright Act of 1976, which eliminated the need for registration and renewal of copyrighted works.
2. The $1 fee would harm copyright owners, particularly those with large numbers of active and potentially commercially viable works.
3. The extension fee would encourage copyright restoration, a process that re-asserts copyright over a public domain work that originated outside the US and for which US copyright was not renewed.
4. The benefits would fail to justify the administrative costs needed to set up and fund a registration system.
5. The MPAA expressed concern about the effects of a story that underlies a currently copyrighted film moving into the public domain (although this would not invalidate the copyright of the film).
6. The MPAA argues that current law already allows for the creation of derivative works via licensing and release of rights.

Proponents such as Lessig have suggested that copyright holders may be motivated to oppose the PDEA by a competitive threat: a huge wave of abandoned works would spill into the public domain which could form the basis of new derived works that would compete commercially with established copyrighted works.